The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Company, which runs town’s Muni Metro gentle rail, claims to be the primary US company to undertake floppy disks. However in the present day, the SFMTA is raring to desert its reliance on 5¼-inch floppy disks—simply give it about six years and some hundred million {dollars} extra.
Members of the SFMTA not too long ago spoke with the ABC7 Bay Area News and detailed the company’s use of three 5¼-inch floppy disks each morning. The floppies have been a part of Muni Metro’s Computerized Prepare Management System (ATCS) since its set up in a Market Road subway cease in 1998. The ATCS has a number of parts, “together with computer systems onboard the trains which are tied into propulsion and brake techniques, central and native servers, and communications infrastructure, like loop cable sign wires,” Michael Roccaforte, an SFMTA spokesperson, informed Ars Technica.
The floppy disks are for loading the software program working the central servers, Roccaforte stated:
Roccaforte stated preliminary planning for an overhaul of the ATCS, together with transferring off floppy disks, began in 2018 and was anticipated to take a decade from preliminary planning to completion. Due to an 18-month-long Covid-19-related hiatus, completion is predicted in 2029 to 2030. SFMTA expects to choose a contractor by early 2025 and can launch an in depth venture timeline then.
“Finally, our purpose is to have a single practice management system for your complete rail system,” Jeffrey Tumlin, SFMTA’s director of transportation, informed ABC7.
Floppy Flaws
“If it ain’t broke do not repair it,” some say. However whereas the floppy-disk-reliant practice management system is presently working, there are challenges to counting on the dated expertise, which SFMTA has highlighted for years.
The transportation physique says the practice management system was constructed to final for simply 20 to 25 years, which means it surpassed its anticipated lifetime in 2023. In 2020, the Muni Reliability Working Group, stated to be composed of native and nationwide transit consultants, recommended changing the transit management system inside 5 to seven years.
When requested how “dire” it’s to improve off of floppy disks, Tumlin informed ABC7 that it is all about danger.
“The system is presently working simply positive, however we all know that with every rising yr, danger of knowledge degradation on the floppy disks will increase and that in some unspecified time in the future there shall be a catastrophic failure,” Tumlin informed ABC7.
Beforehand, the transportation company claimed that the ATCS had turn into tougher and costlier to keep up over time. It has additionally mentioned the challenges it has to find staff who know tips on how to use the dated system.
“We’ve to keep up programmers who’re consultants within the programming languages of the ’90s in an effort to hold working our present system, so now we have a technical debt that stretches again many many years,” Tumlin told San Francisco’s KQED in February 2023.
